Through Shadows Falling
by Tom O'Bedlam
Summary: I never thought my last vision in this world would be a mirror image of my own face. A boy dies, in the dark, alone.


_When trying to finish the third chapter of Decorum and Tranquility the other day, I was accosted by the need to monologue, so here you find the result. I adore reviews. Please give generously. I own nothing. Unfortunately._

My brother ran away from home when I was thirteen. He left at the beginning of Christmas break. It was snowing that night, heavy, wet flakes that didn't quite stick. Mother had exiled Sirius to his room after some fight or another, and when she called him for breakfast the next morning, he was gone. There was a note, saying he was gone and never coming back. Mother burned his name off the family tree before lunch, and by dinner it was as though he'd never existed. The speed of it frightened me more than anything. Mother made me watch as she killed him. That's what it seemed like to me, at least, because we all knew that without the Family, you weren't anyone. Once he was gone from the tree, my brother, Sirius Orion Black, ceased to exist.

The next day Father called me to his study. I have always thought Father's study the most terrifying room in Grimmauld Place. It's a dark cavernous room, with only one small window, protected by thick draperies. There's dust everywhere, because even Kreacher is too scared to clean here and no one orders him to. The walls are covered with floor to ceiling bookcases in heavy oak, packed with old leather books of dark magic. Some of them I've seen in the Restricted Section in the Hogwarts library. Another one, the warm one with the leather cover I know didn't come from a cow, is from Germany, and I haven't seen it's like, even in the service of the Dark Lord.

But I get ahead of myself. That day, I sat on the very edge of a chair in front of the huge oak roll-top desk and listened, wide-eyed, to my Father's lecture on behavior benefiting the heir to the Black name and fortune. After that, it seemed, it was even more important for me to do well, in school and society. It was as though Sirius had died suddenly and I had to take up his duties as heir. But he hadn't had any duties. Father never trusted him after he was Sorted into Gryffindor.

I had no particular duties either, I suppose, but I had expectations piled on my shoulders. Back at school, all the older boys, the high-up boys, the ones Bella and Narcissa had permitted to court them, began to test me, a little. To curse me unexpectedly in the corridors, to see how quickly I reacted. To ask for help with homework, to see if I knew what I needed to. And the more subtle things, the glances and smiles that were all the warning for a boiling feud. They needed to see if I could do and see and understand all these things. And when they saw that I could, they began including me in things. The little games, the experiments with books we found in our attics, the sly spells against our enemies. That was what seduced me, at first. The 'our.' For the first time in my life, I was part of a group beyond the Family, who had to include me. Then, when the joy of that was worn away by the constant competition and betrayal in the group, there were the Dark Arts. The Old Magic, we called it, as our parents had. Hard things, with disastrous results if anything went even a little wrong. My teacher, and later my partner, was Severus Snape. I was never as smart as he, never as good at figuring what the authors of our girmmeries meant, but I was quick enough. I'd spent enough time with my Cousin Andromeda to know more than most of my peers about the theory and construction of spells.

When we were sixteen, we all took the Dark Mark. I didn't even think of questioning it. By then we were so steeped in shadows that we followed them to their maker, the Dark Lord. At first I was put with Snape to research. That was like school again. We would search the old texts for spells and potions our master might like. Then we'd try them, trying to find the mistakes, the intentional errors written into our grimmeries. The old magicians hadn't wanted to make it easy to follow their paths to greatness.

Then, a year later, I was called before my master. I was to be more than a simple researcher, He said. I was to find the traitors in the wizarding world. How I did it, that was up to me, but I was to find them. I returned to Grimmauld Place, and entered Society, using the skills at seeing hidden motives I'd developed at school to try to see through the people I met at balls and parties and suppers. Sometimes I failed. Then I was punished by my master. Sometimes I succeeded. Then I saw someone, a friend or an enemy I'd come to know intimately, die a terrible death. It was soul-destroying work, to learn the joys and failings, the entirety of a man only to kill him the instant you touch on that all-important bit of evidence, that definition of his loyalty.

That was when I began to make plans, hazy ones, about destroying Him. Then, when I was eighteen, Father became ill. And I entered his study, and I read his books, and I learned about many things: the creation of some of the protection on our house, the precise way the Crucius curse works, and most importantly, about horcruxes. Then I thought for a time, nearly three months before I began to work to find His horcruxes. I knew, when I took the locket, that He would send someone for me eventually.

I hadn't expected it to be her. I never thought my last vision in this world would be a mirror image of my own face, that the last thing I'd hear was my cousin saying in her throaty, gorgeous voice, "Avada Kedavra" as she pointed her fifteen inch maple and dragon heartstring wand at my heart.


End file.
